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Languages evolve which often grammar police tend not to accept. Xmas is slowly but inextricably creeping in as accepted. Especially given that services such as twitter limit character number, hence Xmas saves on that 140 characters.

I disagree with this completely.To suggest that we not use a perfectly acceptable word simply because others are not educated to it's origins is not only defeatist but flies in the face of this article.

Isn't the point of this to educate people? Yet here you'd rather bow to some imagined social pressure than inform.

Thank you for treating the two forms of Christmas and Xmas as well as you did. Whatever anyof the comments say, there are millions of Christians in the western world that are offended by the use of Xmas.It seems to cross out Christ' Name as though He had no part in this festive season, even though it was He Who gave it to us in the first place. Just because we don't make a song and dance about it, {except for carols!} and hold militant marches up and down the streets, doesn't make our sadness over this any the less real. This is surely a time of kindness to each other, and all over the world millions of Christians are having the worst of times, so how about a little more goodwill and maybe even thank the One Who started all this as we enter our precious festivities in a freedom that cannot be bought. Happy Christmas to one and all!.

X is not the English X. It's the Greek CHI, which means it's more or less an abbreviation of CHRIST. So there's no need to get upset about it at all. On a related note, legend has it that Constantine had his troops paint XP on their shields after dreaming of that symbol in the sky. The next day he won the Battle of Milvian Ridge. It had nothing to do with Microsoft. The standard advice to fundamentalists of any kind applies: get more educated and you get less offended.

@Gibby1 - No, HE did not give you Xmas. Xmas was being celebrated long before Christ. It is the pagan celebration of the winter solstice. The Catholic church, like its done with most PAGAN holidays that were celebrated for generations before Christ, simply renamed it so it would seem familiar to those pagans whom the Catholic church was at one point desperately trying to convert(or kill). The symbols we use today, are mostly pagan. The same thing goes for Easter, which is not a celebration of the rebirth of Christ as the Catholic would have you believe, but in reality is again, a pagan celebration of the Goddess ISHTAR, aka Astarte, aka Aphrodite, the goddess of love and sex. Her symbols are the hare and the egg, her time is spring and her theme is birth and rebirth and the mating season, aka Spring. There is very little about Xmas or Easter that has anything to do with Christ or the bible, other than that which was assigned by the Catholic church when it decided to take another religions holidays and use them as its own.

If self-proclaimed Christians want to take offence at "Xmas" and thereby announce their ignorance to the world, that's their business. It's a Greek letter chi, for godsake (so to speak).

Little-known trivia that might be worth getting offended by: Windows XP is named for the monogram of Christ: XP is Greek Chi-Rho (first two letters of CH-R-I-S-T-O-S), and also a pun on "Cairo" (the city in Egypt), which was the original code name for the operating system when it was in development. I like to think of it as "the operating system that thinks it's the Lord's annointed"--which pretty much sums up Microsoft's attitude towards itself.

First off, people below have (or above?) have pointed out it's Greek reference regarding the use of 'X'.

But it can always be a reference to the cross, which Jesus died upon.

Also, I am a Christian, and while I observe Christmas, I don't consider it at all to be bibilically related. It was afterall invented by the Catholic Church to draw in new converts. It takes place during the time the Pagan celebration of Saturnalia takes place. Which was the other largely populated 'religion' at the time of Christmas' origin. (also Christmas is short for Christ's Mass for those who didn't know).

I think some people who object to Xmas are doing so for a knee-jerk reason, however there is a grain of truth in the perceived reality that Christmas is being de-Christed (feel free to pick at the grammar in that word :) ) and so the pressure from various Church bodies to avoid the use of Xmas is linked to the campaign to keep Christ at the heart of Christmas. I never use Christmas for this reason but I am not offended by Xmas.

Shannon64, you are rocking the Pagan ideal and I for one appreciateyour view! Anyway, these people need to get a life if x is that offensive. I would think children starving or animal abuse is more deserving of our time and energy. As a matter of fact...

I agree with BeazBall's sentiment, but must make one small correction: Xmas was not adopted for handwriting efficiency; it was adopted because early Christians considered it blasphemous to write out the "Christ," believing that it was too holy. This is why, for example, in the church we see the letters "IHS," which is an abbreviation of "Ihesus"—or Jesus, because it was proscribed to write the full form. This is a proscription that was inherited from Judaism, and there are still Jews today who will write of "G-d." The words written this way was refered to as the nomina sacra; other examples include dmn = Dominus, ds = Deus, ihs = I(h)esus, xr or xrs = Christus, mr = Maria, among others.

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